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Taking a stand for Palestine, Celtic fans prove sport and politics do mix

Celtic fans defy a UEFA ban and police threats to fly the Palestinian flag during against against an Israeli team.

During Glasgow-based football club Celtic FC's August 17 European Champions League qualifying fixture in Glasgow against Israeli club, Hapoel Beer Sheva of Israel, Celtic supporters defied an explicit UEFA ban to fly Palestinian flags in solidarity with Palestine's struggle for freedom.

Middle East Eye reported that “entire sections of fans in the Scottish stadium displayed the Palestinian flag, despite a ban by stadium officials. Prior to the match's start, activists from the group 'Palestine Alliance' handed out flags and leaflets on the Nakba, or Catastrophe, the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel and rendered millions of Palestinians refugees.”

The Daily Record said Scottish police also urged fans to not bring Palestinian flags and threatened them with arrest.

Prior to the game, John Wight discussed on his blog why Celtic fans connect so strongly to the Palestinian struggle -- and why sport and politics do mix. His piece is reprinted below.

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The conventional wisdom that politics should be kept out of sport, that sport and politics do not mix, is a myth propagated by an establishment for whom political engagement on any level, apart from that which involves passively entering a voting booth to put your 'X' in the appropriate box, is deemed a threat to the status quo.

In truth, sports and politics are two sides of the same coin simply because politics and life are two sides of the same coin.

When it comes to football there is no more political an institution than Celtic Football Club in Glasgow. Formed in 1888 by an Irish Catholic cleric known as Brother Walfrid to raise money to feed and minister to the material needs of poverty-stricken Irish immigrants in the West of Scotland — a migrant community whose presence was regarded as anathema to a native population and workforce on the basis that they were people of an alien religion and culture, competing for the same jobs and thereby lowering the wages of all workers by dint of that eternal law of capitalist economics, supply and demand.

Apart from ringing the proverbial bell when it comes to Brexit, it reminds us that we live in a country and a society in Britain that has scarred the world with an Empire that sowed misery and despair on a grand scale when in its pomp, and whose legacy remains a distorting factor today across the world to this day.

The consequence for the Irish in Scotland in the late 19th century was that their assimilation into mainstream society was blocked, forcing them to create a parallel social structures and organisations of their own for the purposes of survival — material and cultural. Celtic FC came into being as part of this process.

Out of this history has derived a concrete identity and set of values that generations of Celtic fans have embraced, upheld, and carried with pride. Aligned with the republican and nationalist community in the North of Ireland, with their bitter Glasgow rivals Rangers FC associated with Ireland's loyalist and unionist community, Celtic supporters are typically among the most politically aware and conscious of any demographic in society. For them Celtic is more than a football club it is a political and social institution that stands for more than season ticket sales, trophies, and glory. For them it has always stood, and must continue to stand, for justice in the face of injustice, racism, oppression, and apartheid wherever and whenever it arises.

Which brings us onto the furore over the intention of Celtic supporters to fly Palestinian flags during the club's European Champions League qualifying fixture against Hapoel Beer Sheva of Israel. Celtic supporters, along with the aforementioned republic and and nationalist community in Ireland, have embraced the Palestinian struggle against occupation and apartheid as their own. It is an affinity based on a shared experience of colonial oppression and the religious, cultural, and racial bigotry upon which it rests. Laid bare and Israel is a settler colonial state that exists at the negation of the Palestinian people, a people whose existence has been reduced to a living hell on a daily basis as a consequence.

Aside from an occupation that has been extant since 1967, aside from the theft of evermore Palestinian land and resources, the expansion of illegal settlements, economic embargo, hundreds of military checkpoints making free passage impossible, and the erection of an apartheid wall; aside from all that the Palestinians have been subjected to numerous full scale military assaults over the years, utilising the most lethal and destructive weaponry in existence, in which thousands of civilians, women and children among them, have been slaughtered or seriously injured and maimed.

The idea that those who carry Palestinian flags are motivated by anything other than the desire to express solidarity with those suffering injustice and oppression, that instead it is antisemitism and racism which drives such people, this is utterly grotesque and deserving of contempt.

It is not Israel's Jewish character that is the issue, as those who attempt to delegitimise the Palestinian struggle and those who support it continually maintain. It is Israel's apartheid character that is the issue, and where better to demonstrate resistance to apartheid than in a packed football stadium alongside thousands of others.

The Palestinian flag is more than a national symbol. It has taken on the mantle of a symbol of defiance in the face of colonial oppression and apartheid, both of which the Ireland to which Celtic FC is historically and culturally rooted has experienced in its long and tortured history.

Sport does not exist in a vacuum and the struggle for justice cannot and should not be parked outside a football stadium for ninety seconds much less ninety minutes. It is why the attempt to ban the Palestinian flag from Celtic Park is tantamount to an attempt to ban justice from Celtic Park.

If such a ban is implemented and succeeds the rumbling that greets it will be the sound of Brother Walfrid turning in his grave.

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In these days of growing media concentration, Green Left Weekly is a proudly independent voice committed to human and civil rights, global peace and environmental sustainability, democracy and equality. By printing the news and ideas the mainstream media won't, Green Left Weekly exposes the lies and distortions of the power brokers and helps us to better understand the world around us.